What we all want

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May 14, 2014 by Diana M

Another thing that was heavily shared recently on Facebook caught my eyes. This time, it was shared by mostly men, and it had the title: “This Pretty Girl Was Seeking A Rich Husband. The Reply She Got From A Banker Was Priceless!”. One of the guys from my social network even shared it using the line: “Oh Snap! The truth nowadays. Dumb Bitches” Now that definitely caught my attention. And before you start throwing tomatoes my way because something like this would catch my attention, I just want to clarify: yes, I am a bit of a feminist, and no, the fact that it was a little demeaning is not the reason that prompted me to write this. Let’s just say it was the cherry on top of a very high layered cake.

I’ll start with this though: I am sick and tired of seeing all these Facebook posts and Pinterest ‘quotes’ that fall into one of two categories: the first is shared by a majority of women, and it’s about wanting boys to behave more like gentlemen and asking questions such as “why can’t they be more like Ryan Gosling”, trying to demand respect and love and tenderness from the opposite sex. Well, hey girl, stop making all these fucked up fantasies about what guys should be like in the first place. Besides, there’s only one Ryan Gosling out there and no one else can come close to him.

The other category represents, of course, the guys and it’s about wanting girls to stop being dumb or slutty or chasing after their money as the gold-diggers that they are. Not to mention the posts about girls being overly emotional, overly attached, or just plain crazy. Mad men of the world, I know we’re PMS-ed most of the time, but please oh please stop treating us as brainless hoes or usable ‘things’ that can be disposed of later on.

We have all these demands and requests from each other, that we overlooked or even forgot one very important fact. At the end of the day, we all want the same thing.

We all want someone to share our lives with, someone who gets us, someone we can laugh with, and talk with, and build a life with. Problem is when that doesn’t quite go as expected, when we get burned, we start throwing hateful words out there. The guy we once fell in love with becomes the asshole that broke our hearts, and is the front-runner of many assholes to come. The girl we couldn’t get out of our heads before becomes the bitch that cheated on us, and a reason to stop caring about women altogether.

What we need to understand is that people are uniquely different from one another, and we’re not compatible with oh so many of them. And the few bad romantic experiences that we had in our lives do not constitute a reason for stereotyping the opposite sex, or mistreating people because we are the ones that are scared of getting burned again. Because this is exactly what we do. We crawl into our little corners, and in our desperation to protect our broken hearts, we put them in a box and close the lid. We develop a ‘not-caring’ or ‘not-giving-a-shit’ defense system consisting of sleeping around with whatever comes our way, making poor relationship decisions, and lashing out at people near us, not to mention pushing the good ones as far away as possible. Because God forbid we might actually develop real feelings for someone again. And all because we’re scared to open up one more time, afraid that our fragile hearts might not take another beating.

When we draw the line though, no matter who we are, no matter our gender, race, age, location or sexual preference, we ALL want the same damn thing: to love and be loved in return.

Sometimes we want a little too much: someone who’s beautiful and sexy and smart and funny and successful etc. Sometimes we may be looking in all the wrong places, and meeting all the wrong people. But at night, when we go to sleep, all that we could possibly desire is that one perfectly imperfect person who is oh so perfect to our own imperfection.

If people would spend more time on learning to open up their hearts and loving without fears or expectations and less time on playing games and roles just to prove that they can be the last (proverbial) man standing, we would all be so much better off. Instead, we choose to post about how interesting but underrated we girls are, or how manly and popular we boys are. We flaunt our conquers and our indifference publicly to our social media network, trying to pass off as much more of a bad-ass than we really are. We want the world to know that we are not weak, that we are not emotional, but all we manage to do is paint a fake picture of a solid-looking wall. We add brick after brick to that image, plastering it with selfies and bits and pieces of our interests, until we’ve completely sealed ourselves off to the world. But hey, at least we’re seen as being the ‘cool’ people publicly.

Behind closed doors though, when we turn off the lights and crawl back to our beds at night, we’re all hit by the same feeling of loneliness. All of this because we’re too afraid of admitting to others and ourselves that we love loving people. And we love being loved by people.

Don’t you just wish sometimes you could strip away all those fake images of what you want people to see you as, and just be your unapologetically, imperfectly, beautiful self for once? And find someone who’s just as courageous and free as you, to share who you are with?